OS X used to be primarily for PowerPC. Of no relation to x86 at all. So you really did need universal (aka 'fat') binaries for a while.

And remember that running x86 binaries on x86_64 requires all the necessary libraries exist in 32-bit form on the machine. This might not be the case here, particularly given how long ago Sphere was ported to OS X.

The OSX platform is almost only updated for the 64 bit software. It means that any new programs will be compiled to 64 bit, and that the new libraries only exist in 64bit. The fragile Objective-C ABI is also 64 bit only, and a lot of optimizations is 64bit only. When writing for OSX, it is mostly 64bit only nowadays.

Ah, alright, that makes sense then. And yes, I knew OS X used to be for PPC, I had nothing against PPC+x86 fat binaries, it's just the x86+x64 ones that seemed like a waste of space. But if most of the low-level libraries for OS X are 64-bit-only, then it makes sense. I guess I'm just biased because I've been spoiled from using Windows for so long, which has always included the full set of Win32 libraries along with the Win64 ones, and thus x86-only apps run natively. And I'm not positive, but I think Linux might be the same as Windows in that regard.

X86 applications run natively, but they can't use some new stuff. Chrome used to run in 32 bit, IIRC. AFAIK, I don't see any 32 bit programs running on my system now. There is just no reason to run in 32 bit On windows and linux, there are reasons to do so. Mostly way-back-legacy and poort universal packaging.

I could run a 32-bit binary, but I would need to first install literally every libraries it needs in 32-bit form. So no, not as things stand right now. There are NO 32-bit binaries or libraries, with the possible exception of my bootloader and some bootstrapping portion of my kernel.

And on Gentoo, every program that can be is distributed as source-only, and compiled on the end machine. I don't and never have had a 32-bit capable version of GCC installed.

It's very uncommon for Linux programs that are distributed as binaries to not include a 64-bit version, and even rarer for source-distributed programs to not be 64-bit ready.

I was under the impression that the situation for OS X was somewhere between Windows and Linux.

What if you install Steam games? I was under the impression that there's a fair bit of 32-bit stuff on Steam. (But that might just be me spouting things; I haven't done any fact checking.)

The situation has yet to come up for me

Previously, on my Fedora machine, Steam just downloaded opaque binaries and libraries for whatever it needed, which either had very odd library settings or were mostly statically linked. Likely to avoid problems like this.

To the original question my final version wanted the frameworks in a folder called frameworks in the same directory as the app, not inside the package or installed anywhere else. There were earlier versions that wanted them in your user's library folder.

That said I'm not aware of it being tested on anything newer than Neo's snow leopard MacBook, so it may just break on newer machines.